


Clover, Flame

by Miniatures



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 12x06 spoilers, Background Destiel, Background Sabriel, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Reapers, Wayward Daughters (implied)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-25
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 01:31:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8646535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miniatures/pseuds/Miniatures
Summary: Billie's been trying to reap Mary Winchester since 1983. It hasn't always worked.





	

The first time, Mary is young. Angry and frightened, watching the drip, drip, drip of fat and blood on the floor of her son’s bedroom. Her bones are black, her crackling flesh splitting like the skins of cooked fruit. Her soul burns too, but it doesn’t hurt anymore—a living mark, a scar.

Billie puts it out.

Dark hair and dark eyes and dark skin, materializing out of the last shadowed corner of the room, humming an old, warm song. The Reaper smells sweet, but her voice is sweeter. She reaches through the flame, cups Mary’s cheek, and smiles. She gleams in the firelight, _with_ firelight. The only word for her is Earth.

“They’re safe, Mary,” she says gently. “I promise. You know what I am, don’t you? Don’t need to hear the speech? Come on, let me take you away.”

“I’m dead,” Mary replies. Flat and resigned—stupid, because of course she is. She knows she is. In the back of her mind, she hears Dean grown up and tired, begging her not to get out of bed.

“You sure are, honey.” Billie brings up another hand to another cheek, and the fire goes out. The Reaper’s scent grows stronger—soil and rain and sweet clover. “I’m sorry for how it happened, Mary, I know it hurt. But it’s done now, and your boys are safe. You’ve earned your peace.”

_Peace_. She’d had that, hadn’t she? With John and Sam and Dean. Her last scattered hunts years behind her, nothing but picket fences and family ahead. That was the peace she had wanted, the peace she had thought she’d already earned.

“I don’t want it,” she says, spits bitter from behind her teeth. “I want _them_. I want to be alive again, I deserve that.”

Billie pulls her hands away, crosses her arms over her chest. “Sure you do. So does everybody, hear them tell it.”

“Does _this_ happen to everybody?” Mary gestures to her feet—the flames have sputtered back to life around her soles.

“No. Some folk get it worse—slower.”

“Please, you know this wasn’t fair.”

“Death rarely is, baby.” Billie’s eyes soften. “But if you come with me, it’ll be much easier to bear. You know better than anyone what’ll happen if you stay.”

Mary knows. But she is also young and angry and frightened, and so she turns Billie down.

 

The second time, Mary has spent twenty-two years roaming her rebuilt home, staving off unwanted intruders. Protracted time in a feverish limbo, furious and endless. She thinks of John and their children on a loop, three faces spinning in what little remains of her mind. She sees babies until two men step inside.

Sam is boyish yet, still bright and fatted with youth, but an adult all the same. Mary saves him, and only realizes he belongs to her in the split second before she smells sweet clover.

Billie slips a hand in hers, and the fire goes out.

“Time’s up,” she whispers.

 

The third time, Mary is still young, but she seems to herself to be much older. Eleven years in Heaven, getting lost in a honeyed memoryscape, giving in to the dreamlike timelessness… it feels like eleven years, and like a heartbeat all the same.

This time, the bodies burning aren’t hers. This time, she is solid and Billie is too, more defined. All curve and curl, soil and rain. Mary doesn’t recognize her until she says her name, the memories buried under Heaven.

Billie hasn’t aged, but something about her is tired. Mary knows that exhaustion—it’s one borne of a fight that can’t be won, a helpless, righteous anger for a problem that will never be solved. She remembers it from her time as a ghost, and from their first encounter. From a life spent hacking off the limbs of a deathless enemy, only to succumb to it in the one moment her back was turned.

She tells Billie no for the sake of her boys, but there’s a long, long minute where she thinks she might like to go back. Take that soft hand and breathe that sweet clover deep and sink into that peace once more. Mary feels like she’s floating away sometimes, and though Heaven and her phantom home were hardly grounding, Billie is the siren call of Earth. Stability and warmth.

Later, Dean tells her that Billie is the new Death— _or Head Reaper, or whatever the hell you want to call it_. Mary figures that would tire any creature.

 

The fourth time, fifth time, sixth and so-onth times, Mary has settled into aging again, and is less young, angry, and frightened with each visit. Sometimes her hands are bloody. Sometimes they’re broken. Sometimes she’s weeping, sometimes laughing, sometimes waiting for the scent of her personal death omen.

Always, Billie asks her to come away.

Mary wonders, once, why Billie still bothers after all this time. She wonders it smiling, scrubbing ectoplasm from underneath her fingernails. Her knuckles are scraped raw.

“Like I said,” Billie said, “I believe what’s dead should stay that way.”

“We can’t be the first family to fuck around on you like this,” Mary says, raising an eyebrow.

“No.” Billie narrows her eyes. “But you’re certainly the most annoying.”

“Can you really blame us for wanting to live?”

Billie sighs and bends over, passing her hands over Mary’s. The ectoplasm remains, but her knuckles are whole again. “I don’t understand it. This world is brutal, what damn fool wouldn’t prefer to sleep? Why do as much damage as you and yours have done, all for a few more painful years? You’re as shortsighted as you are selfish.”

Mary’s smile widens. “That’s just how we were made.”

“Well.” Billie straightens up tall. Her curls brush past Mary’s nose. “I was made to do my job. Sorry if that means ruining your day.”

“You don’t,” Mary murmurs. Billie is already gone.

One year later, the Reaper catches Mary making bacon, and Mary gives her a piece. The grease shines on her lips, and Mary thinks they look delectable even as they inform her that Billie prefers sweet to savory.

Three years later, Billie teaches her that old, warm song she was humming when they first met. Mary sings it to her boys, and to herself on cold nights.

Four years later, Billie steals a slice of cake from Dean and Castiel’s bunker wedding. Mary pretends not to notice, but she smiles. She begins to bake between hunts, and when Billie comes around treats begin to go missing.

And so it goes, and so it goes, and time ticks by at a pace Mary has come to recognize as peaceful. Billie is intermittent, an awaited interlude between the Resurrection of the Archangels, the Fall of Hell, the Rearrangement of Heaven, another angelic wedding—this one Sam’s. Soon the bunker is as bustling with men as Jody’s home is with women, though the two populations cross over frequently. Claire Novak is everyone’s daughter. She offers Billie one of Mary’s snickerdoodles after Gabriel pulls her back from the brink.

 

“Please. Don’t take him.”

“Mary, you know he’s beyond repair.”

“He did nothing wrong, he’s a _civilian_. I could’ve saved him if I was just a minute quicker, I could’ve—”

“But you weren’t, Mary. You weren’t, and it’s okay.”

“…”

“…”

“… Make it easy for him.”

“That I’m happy to do. Tea next Thursday?”

“Fuck you, Billie.”

“I’ll see you at four.”

 

The last time, Mary is old. She’s made it longer than she ever thought she would, and she is cozy and ready to slip away. She and Sam and Dean bake three pies—strawberry-rhubarb, apple, and peach. They say their tearful goodbyes, promise to catch up on the other side. The boys each take home a pie to their angels, leaving the peach with Mary.

She’s always cold now, so she settles in under blankets, placing the pie on the coffee table by her favourite chair. She takes a slice for herself, eating it hot. Wipes the crumbs from her mouth, closes her eyes, and sleeps.

The smell of soil, of rain, of sweet clover envelops her. Mary glances at herself, looking small and pale under her blankets. Looks at the pie, watches as Billie sucks its peachy innards from her thumb.

“Delicious,” the Reaper says, and smiles. “Your best yet, honey.”

“I’d sure as hell hope so,” Mary says.

Billie’s smile widens, her eyes soften, and she reaches out her clean hand to Mary. “Come on, baby. Fair is fair—you’re mine, now.”

Her hand is soft and cool. Mary squeezes it. “All the times you’ve come for me, I think I’ve been yours for a while.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've been thinking about this all week. Apparently I'm the only one who ships it (according to the... one person I talked to), but I find this pairing potentially FASCINATING. Also, it's about damn time I wrote some femslash, amirite?


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